How the advertising industry risks missing the point again
Those who reduce marketing to optimisation slowly optimise themselves out of relevance. Growth happens in the human brain rather than in dashboards.
What ten years of digital acceleration have really taught us about brands, growth and marketing effectiveness
Ten years ago, Ian Leslie wrote How the Mad Men Lost the Plot, a sharp essay on how the advertising industry risked losing itself in its embrace of big tech. It struck a nerve with advertisers, executives and CFOs who had increasingly come to see marketing as an optimisation problem.
Ten years later, the question is no longer whether he was right.
The question is: have we actually learned anything?
From cultural industry to technological appendage
The advertising industry was once a cultural force. It competed with Hollywood. It created collective memories. Campaigns were shared, quoted and sung. Brands built meaning at scale.
Today, international marketing events often speak a different language: dashboards, impressions, attribution models, martech stacks. Technology has often become an end in itself rather than a tool. As one experienced creative once put it cynically: “Cannes sometimes feels more like a trade fair for industrial roof insulation than a showcase of ideas.”
That feeling is a strategic warning, rather than nostalgia.
The fundamental misconception of digital efficiency
The digital promise was seductive:
perfectly measurable
hyper-targeted
without waste
But that is precisely where the paradox lies.
Decades of empirical research, particularly from Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, have taught us something still applied too rarely:
Brands grow by broadening mental availability rather than deepening loyalty.
In other words:
Growth comes from light buyers, rather than loyal fans
Market share grows through reach, rather than engagement
Memory beats relevance
Digital marketing is exceptionally good at targeting people who already buy.
But that is precisely what makes it strategically inefficient.
“The value lies in the waste”
What was dismissed for years as “waste” — mass reach, repetition and imperfect targeting — turns out to be exactly what makes brands big.
Strong brands:
also reach people who are not interested right now
often say little, but say it consistently
influence buying behaviour indirectly and over time
Advertising does not work like a sales conversation.
It works as a probabilistic memory machine and builds conditioned reflexes (Pavlov and others).
An emotional TV campaign changes the probability of someone buying your brand by a fraction of a percentage point. Invisible. Unmeasurable in the short term. But at scale, that fraction translates into millions.
Why “engagement” rarely produces growth
The obsession with engagement — likes, shares and comments — collides directly with how people actually relate to brands.
The hard reality:
Most consumers do not care about brands
They do not want a relationship, a dialogue or a project
They want to choose without thinking
Data repeatedly shows negligible engagement rates. The problem lies in the premise rather than the quality of the campaigns.
As one senior marketer once said bluntly: “After fifteen years of digital experiments, we have learned that people do not want to talk to brands — because they do not care about them.”
Emotion, consistency and cultural imprint
The most effective campaigns of recent decades share three characteristics:
Emotion above argument
Consistency above novelty
Cultural recognition above personalisation
This explains why classic campaigns, from Guinness to John Lewis, are remembered decades later while thousands of “smart” digital campaigns have vanished without a trace.
Brands are not stories you rewrite every six months.
They are mental shortcuts you nurture for years.
Technology is not the problem — reducing everything to tools is
To be clear: this is not an argument against technology, data or AI.
Quite the opposite.
The problem arises when:
technology replaces strategy
data displaces meaning
optimisation loses direction
The future lies in intelligent integration, rather than an either-or choice:
technology as an accelerator
data as a compass
creativity as a memory anchor
What this means for CEOs and marketing decision-makers
For leaders seeking sustainable growth, the implications are clear:
Stop judging marketing exclusively on short-term metrics
Invest again in reach, recognition and consistency
Use technology to strengthen mental availability rather than fragment it
Build brands like infrastructure: patiently, robustly and with the future in mind
Or, as Warren Buffett's approach essentially demonstrates: brands are long-term assets rather than a cost item.
The BrandQs perspective
At BrandQs, we start with the laws of growth rather than tools.
We combine:
empirical marketing insights
strategic discipline
creative strength
and smart technology
Our purpose is to give brands a place in people's minds again, rather than add noise. In a world full of dashboards, one truth remains:
The most important media space is still the human brain.
👉 Want to build a brand that performs in dashboards and stays in people's minds?
BrandQs helps businesses grow through strategies that use technology without losing their soul.
English version of the BrandQs archive. Historical references are preserved.